The increasingly political consumer

Els Aerts, co-founder and managing partner of AGConsult found that only about 5% of her users were using search. And while some studies find higher numbers, everyone seems to agree that searchers are in the minority.

‘Browsers’ want to see every possible link on one big giant JavaScript menu. Browsers HATE this because it gives them too many choices. They would rather make several simple choices than one big honking one.”

users clicking is a good thing, so long as those clicks reward the user.

To understand the difference between browsers and searchers, consider the professors we all had in college. Most of us have had a professor who got straight to the point, clearly and systematically lectured in a way that was easy to outline. Most of us have also had a professor who wandered out on tangents, would pause the entire lesson to focus on a new idea, or preferred storytelling over summarizing. Perhaps the first professor was dry and boring, perhaps she was refreshingly efficient and articulate. Perhaps the second professor was inspiring and spellbinding, perhaps he was exhausting and impossible to follow.

Data-driven design (design that is determined by the most clicks, interactions, conversions) isn't very good

What I was really after was the confluence of RSS feeds and Twitter and the ability to post to my own site.

In website design, it was important to combine the interests of different stakeholders: marketing, branding, visual design, and usability. Marketing and branding people needed to enter the interactive world where usability was important. Usability people needed to take marketing, branding, and aesthetic needs into account when designing websites. User experience provided a platform to cover the interests of all stakeholders: making web sites easy to use, valuable, and effective for visitors. This is why several early user experience publications focus on website user experience

Resetting expectations. As corporate leaders become aware of the power of design, many view design thinking as a solution to all their woes. Designers, enjoying their new level of strategic influence, often reinforce that impression. When I worked with the entertainment company, I was part of that problem, primarily because my livelihood depended on selling design consulting. But design doesn’t solve all problems. It helps people and organizations cut through complexity. It’s great for innovation. It works extremely well for imagining the future. But it’s not the right set of tools for optimizing, streamlining, or otherwise operating a stable business. Additionally, even if expectations are set appropriately, they must be aligned around a realistic timeline—culture changes slowly in large organizations. An organizational focus on design offers unique opportunities for humanizing technology and for developing emotionally resonant products and services. Adopting this perspective isn’t easy. But doing so helps create a workplace where people want to be, one that responds quickly to changing business dynamics and empowers individual contributors. And because design is empathetic, it implicitly drives a more thoughtful, human approach to business.

Embracing risk. Transformative innovation is inherently risky. It involves inferences and leaps of faith; if something hasn’t been done before, there’s no way to guarantee its outcome. The philosopher Charles Peirce said that insights come to us “like a flash”—in an epiphany—making them difficult to rationalize or defend. Leaders need to create a culture that allows people to take chances and move forward without a complete, logical understanding of a problem. Our partners at the entertainment company were empowered to hire a design consultancy, and the organization recognized that the undertaking was no sure thing.

Several years ago, I consulted for a large entertainment company that had tucked design away in a select group of “creatives.” The company was excited about introducing technology into its theme parks and recognized that a successful visitor experience would hinge on good design. And so it became apparent that the entire organization needed to embrace design as a core competence. This shift is never an easy one. Like many organizations with entrenched cultures that have been successful for many years, the company faced several hurdles.

IBM and GE are hardly alone. Every established company that has moved from products to services, from hardware to software, or from physical to digital products needs to focus anew on user experience. Every established company that intends to globalize its business must invent processes that can adjust to different cultural contexts. And every established company that chooses to compete on innovation rather than efficiency must be able to define problems artfully and experiment its way to solutions.

Design thinking is an essential tool for simplifying and humanizing.

“There’s no longer any real distinction between business strategy and the design of the user experience,” said Bridget van Kralingen, the senior vice president of IBM Global Business Services, in a statement to the press. In November 2013 IBM opened a design studio in Austin, Texas—part of the company’s $100 million investment in building a massive design organization

the iterative process works at GE: “GE is moving away from a model of exhaustive product requirements. Teams learn what to do in the process of doing it, iterating, and pivoting.” Employees in every aspect of the business must realize that they can take social risks—putting forth half-baked ideas, for instance—without losing face or experiencing punitive repercussions.

Tolerate failure. A design culture is nurturing. It doesn’t encourage failure, but the iterative nature of the design process recognizes that it’s rare to get things right the first time. Apple is celebrated for its successes, but a little digging uncovers the Newton tablet, the Pippin gaming system, and the Copland operating system—products that didn’t fare so well. (Pippin and Copland were discontinued after only two years.) The company leverages failure as learning, viewing it as part of the cost of innovation.

In design-centric organizations, you’ll typically see prototypes of new ideas, new products, and new services scattered throughout offices and meeting rooms. Whereas diagrams such as customer journey maps explore the problem space, prototypes explore the solution space. They may be digital, physical, or diagrammatic, but in all cases they are a way to communicate ideas. The habit of publicly displaying rough prototypes hints at an open-minded culture, one that values exploration and experimentation over rule following.

Lastly, as a designer, the UX / UI world is not your only avenue to designer career path fulfillment. I've seen career paths for designers go in a thousand creative directions. And in a career that may last 30+ years, be open to changing industries or career focus to ensure long-term relevance. Art Director in an Ad Agency? Make that switch to UX. Copywriter still writing direct mail? Go take a content strategy course. Alan Ball, the screenwriter of the film American Beauty was working as a graphic designer at Adweek when the idea for the film hit him.  A classmate of mine from design school later went on to become an iron chef. The point is to keep an open mind, be open to where life takes you and don't get tunnel vision on what you *think* you should be doing. Designer Career paths are long, and can take you in a lot of surprising, interesting directions, if you're open to it. One of my favorite quotes is "if you want to hear god laugh, tell him your plans."

This corporate scale-up is not purely a US phenomenon. Rumor has it that Barclays is now the biggest employer of design talent in London, and Singtel has built out a massive floor for its design team in Singapore. __But no one has been more aggressive in building design into their core capabilities than IBM, which is on track to grow their design team to 1,000 people, making them by most measures the largest design firm in the world. __According to one friend they had 50 designers start the same week this summer. There are rumors that IBM offered a job to every single CMU grad this year in the interaction design program.

Bythiswemeanthatthereisalwaysadistinctiontobedrawnbetweenwhattechnologiesaresupposed(ordesigned)todoandwhatpeopleactuallydowiththem.Inotherwords,whatevertheintentionsandgoalsofthedesignersandinventorsofdifferentcommunicationtechnologies,‘ordinary’peopleinevitablymaketheirowndecisionsaboutwhethertheywanttousethetechnology,and,moreimportantly,howtheywanttouseitbasedontheirownneedsandvalues.

Investigating the Connection between Usability and Learning Outcomes inOnline Learning Environments 

“Motion should above all else help guide users, providing them with the right information at the right time.” — Google

When users interact with your product, they might ask following questions:“What’s most important here?”“How do I know what to do next?”“How do I know I have completed my task?”

From Learner Centered to Learner Experience (LX)

User Experience Design

Here at Yoast, we are worried about the use of new technology combined with the introduction of big new concepts.

If you can create an image that sticks with someone and they inject meaning into it, you’ve done something amazing.

Building navigation based on tasks and content means breaking down what tasks people will be performing, and what they’ll see along the way, and mapping out relationships between the two. Determine how tasks relate to one another — which tasks are more or less important, which tasks are siblings, which ones nest inside one another, and which tasks will be performed more or less often.

crucial difference between telling a story and clicking through screens.

Good UX motion design isn’t simply animating assets. Whether we’re injecting delight and playfulness, defining scalable new patterns, or conceptualizing a crazy new product, motion tells a story.

One of the most notable behavioral distinctions between digital adopters and natives is the latter’s preference for interaction over passive consumption.

After all we call it human centered design for a reason. If you want to create something memorable, inspiring, and meaningful tapping into emotion provokes a powerful response, and can lift even the simplest of experiences into something people love to use.

Does this request include any customer information? 

Julia.Sa@capitalone.com

Google’s Matias Duarte observed that “it’s much more positive, engaging, delightful, and stimulating” to directly manipulate something instead of clicking and waiting for a response.

By truly understanding the behavioral shifts and evolving language in our digital spaces, we can begin to design appropriately for the problems we see now and anticipate the potential of what is to come.

Ask yourself: Is this experience a pleasure to use, does it offer meaning, does it provoke an emotion?

Good user experience design is often invisible because it’s not just about how something looks, but instead about how it works. My friend and colleague Drew Shimomura helps distinguish between visual design and UX this way: “Visual design says ‘make it clear and simple’ while UX says ‘don’t make me think.’”

A text document packed with information feels daunting, but a lesson broken down into cards feels manageable.

The swiping gestures give users a sense of completion with each card and stack

it was important to keep the essence of what the motions were trying to accomplish, i.e focusing the attention of the user on what is happening and giving him a sense of spatial order within the app.

Motion here provides spatial location

The icons being aligned with the security chip, guiding the users’ eyes straight down.

Up to a certain threshold, we snap the bar in place so the user doesn’t have to do too much finger travel to get to this state.

To really validate these findings we’d need to flip the exercise on it’s head, and see if people know where to find things when presented with just our group names. For this we’d use what’s known as a ‘Tree test’. In this test, all the collections would be subdivided into our groups. These groups would then be presented with only their names visible to the test participants. Participants would then be asked where they would look for a specific collection. The groups we went with for the test are shown below.

Bringing User Experience to Education: UDL and Inclusion for the 21st Century" and my keynote address, which I refer to at the conclusion of the post, is about "Universal Learning Experiences: How UDL and UX Structure Inclusion & Transfer in Education for All." 

For instance, a set of stairs does not just afford climbing, but based on the angle of construction, may facilitate an easy climb, pose challenges to climbing, or be unclimbable entirely

Six Steps to Superior Product Prototyping: Lessons from an Apple and Oculus Engineer

SBLM People Ideas Work Contact

. The changes we now see in products like the iPhone are minor and incremental: they make the existing solution marginally better, but don’t take the product to a whole new place

When dealing with technology, there are two dominant discourses that permeate research and practice: determinism and non-determinism. For the former discourse, ethics is only an issue for the designers of technology, because they determine what users should do; for the latter, ethics is only an issue for users, because they ultimately define what to do with technology. Both

nteraction designers try to impose structures upon human action by shaping coercive environments where people are punished if they do things the “wrong way” and by hiding or not providing options for changing artifact adaptations. Interaction design mediates human agency and power, but if it does not provide choices for action, there is no room for ethics: people act based on conditions, not on considerations of what should be done.

According to the weather service, areas expected to be affected include campgrounds next to the river as well as ranches, farms and roadways.

I’ve learned throughout my career that the most significant UX performance gains often come down to microcopy.

evidence about obtaining higher productivity by using Agile methods

Summary: Displaying faceted-search controls on mobile devices in a ‘tray’ overlay is a new effective solution to the challenge of showing both results and filters on small screens.

During mobile e-commerce usability study Baymard Institute observed that more than 50% of users tried to “search within” their currently navigated category path, in an attempt to “filter the product list on my screen with a search query”. However, 94% of mobile e-commerce sites and apps do not support such behavior.

image’s tendency to win dramatically dropped when it contained more than 3 people.

two images of villainous characters seen below significantly outperformed all others:

this diversity was reflected in the winning images and how much they varied between different countries and cultures:

but regional nuances can be powerful

the only real problem remaining is the user experience that entices teachers to contribute content

What should a user journey contain?

There is a lot of evidence that quite subtle changes to user interfaces can have dramatic effects on how the interfaces are used. For example, the size of a search box or the text that accompanies it can considerably influence the queries that people submit.

The whole gendered usage of hearts seems to have escaped Twitter. So does the fact that people fave (with stars) in complex ways - they are bookmarks, they are likes, they are nods of the head. But they are not indicators of love. I feel very weird loving tweets by random men I've only just started a conversation with. Not that there's anything wrong with feminine. But women - and men, in their own ways - are well-aware of how feminized visual signals get read by others, and in an identity space like Twitter, I suspect that will really minimize usage. Or at least until we all get used to it.

Ideally, you should be using the smallest possible gadget to do as much as possible before going to the next largest gizmo in line.

Summary: Role-based IAs increase cognitive effort and user anxiety. Clear language and mutually exclusive categories reduce the chance of harming the user experience.

We discuss two examples where, byprioritizing user satisfaction as measured by ads blindnessor sightedness, we have changed the auction ranking func-tion [10] and drastically reduced the ad load on the mobileinterface. Reducing the mobile ad load strongly improvedthe user experience but was a substantially short-term rev-enue negative chang

When you hear people talk about Slack they often say it’s “fun”. Using it doesn’t feel like work.

In the below example from LinkedIn, combining a wizard form with a progress bar is a great tactic for improving the pace of the experience. The long process of creating a professional profile is divided into 4 manageable steps

Most of these difficulties would be addressed by the fundamental characteristics of a digital annotation system. The digital annotation system would automatically store and link annotations and sources with machine tidiness. As noted above, it is more than likely in a distributed system that annotations will be stored separately from the sources to which they refer. However, unlike the real-world equivalents, they would automatically hold information that links them effectively to the associated source. However, it is incumbent upon that system to display a clear association between annotation and source. But the potentially limitless capacity of an electronic writing space, indeed one that expands its viewing size to the later reader commensurate with the size of text inserted, would easily resolve the analogue annotator's problem of insufficient writing space. Moreover, it is worth taking into consideration the change that such expanded capacity may have upon the behaviour of annotators; an uncramped writing space may equally 'uncramp' their style and encourage them to be more expansive and, possibly, more informative. Equally important, there is no limit upon subsequent annotations relating to the original source or, for that matter, to the initial annotation. Clearly an example where the distributed nature of digital annotation presents a clear advantage. Even a clearer annotation generally still lacks all or some of the following: an author, or author status, a date or time, and where the annotation relies on other text or supporting evidence, (e.g. "This contradicts his view in Chapter 3"), it may have no clear direct reference either. A further complication might be the annotations, (or even counter-annotations) of another anonymous party. It is worth remarking that a digital system would be able to record the date and time of the annotation action, the source, and give some indication of the person who initiated the marking. If it were deemed unacceptable in certain systems, the annotation could be rejected as giving inadequate content. Once again the advantage of virtually unlimited writing space would allow the annotator to quote, if desired, the text to which (s)he refers elsewhere; alternatively the functionality that permits the annotator to highlight a source could also be adapted to permit the highlighting of a reference item for inclusion in the annotation body as a hypertext link. Some, but not necessarily all of the analogue difficulties may have been encountered; but they all serve to illustrate the difficulties that arise the moment annotations cease only to be read by their original author. It is outside that limited context that we largely need to consider annotations in the distributed digital environment. Picking up on this aspect, we might therefore consider the challenge posed by any system of annotation that intends to have an audience of greater than one, and, conceivably of scores or hundreds of annotators and annotation readers. Irrespective of their number, what makes such multiple annotations unreliable is one's ignorance of the kind of person who made the annotation: expert? amateur? joker? authority? Who wrote the annotation probably ranks as more important than any other undisclosed information about it. In this regard an annotator is no different from an author or writer of papers. Understanding the authority with which an annotation is made can be a key determinant in users' behaviour when accessing annotations across a distributed system.